The match that wasn't

I had just got the feeling that 19th April 2011 was going to be a weird kind of day - where life plays its natural game. Goof ups and disappointments on one side, craziness and hope on the other. I was scheduled to attend the Royal Challengers Bangalore versus Rajasthan Royals match at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore. Dark clouds were gathering on the horizon but we had hope: after all, it's not over till the fat lady sings - is it? At the end of it all, it all turned out to be worth it.

4.30 PM: My colleague Gokul Gopal and I were all set to go, but there was the important decision to be made: an auto-rickshaw or our own vehicles? A coin was tossed and the decision was made. It was a good toss to lose. The vehicles were parked 6 kilometres away from the stadium and an auto-rickshaw was procured.

5.00 PM: Hello Chinnaswamy Stadium - err, sorry scratch that. Hello dark skies and rain. You were the last thing we wanted at this stage. There was a security check of course, but with a difference. This is the IPL, it's party time, and one or two of the cops on duty for the security check must have thought so too. They imbibed the spirit in their own way: the security check for them was the security (i.e. themselves) checking out the many pretty faces that had come to the stadium.

We made our way inside the stadium accompanied by a steady drizzle. The eternal optimist in me asserted himself, saying that just a slight drizzle would do no harm whatsoever.

6.00 PM: "RCB is in our RBC" was the placard that Gokul and I (both Bangalore boys) proudly displayed. For the uninitiated, the RBC stands for Red Blood Cells. The clock kept ticking but it didn't look like rain wanted Rahul Dravid to play against his home city.

8.00 PM: There were butterflies in my stomach now. Not because I was nervous, but because I was hungry. The rain didn't stop, the match got delayed and at long last someone declared the buffet dinner OPEN. (Ah! Just what the doctor ordered.)

9.00 PM: Ever been in a room full of laughing people where you are the only one who didn't get the joke? No? Try this: be a tee-totaller in an environment where everyone else is drinking alcohol that is included as part of the buffet menu. Vodka with coke seemed to be everybody's bread-and-butter shot, but my cup of tea was a glass of soft drink only. As the tall and famous commentator (whose 'bread-and-butter' quotes are highlighted in this piece in case you haven't caught on) would have said, "Ajith knew exactly what he was doing."

9.30 PM: Dinner was almost over and the big screen in the buffet lounge lit up. It flashed (and flashed hard!) the live images of the covers being removed accompanied by a huge roar. I went back to the stands like a tracer bullet.

10.00 PM: The toss was to be held at 10.10 PM, with the match scheduled to start at 10.30 PM - that was the message on the big screen. The players were given a rousing cheer as they prepared for the big game while doing their warm-up routines. The cut-off time for a game to happen was about 11.15 PM. If any more rain came, the race to have a match was going to go down to the wire. Just as I thought that, the skies opened up again. There were still about 20,000 people who had braved the rains and the delay and at about 11 PM, the game was called off, leaving many of the faithful disappointed.

11.30 PM: At the start of the day, I was the one who had a feeling. At the end of it, Gokul had one. Well, after night we had had, something had to give, and what gave was our sense of time and distance. Gokul decided that we would walk the 6 kilometres that we had to travel to reach our vehicles. I agreed. It had just been that kind of a day. What part of us made us think we could walk it? "Heads is the call" would surely NOT have been the answer! We quickly discovered that 6 kilometres wasn't the breezy walk-in-the-park that we had assumed it would be. We needed to pace our innings well and at one stage all three results were possible: we could have abandoned the walk mid-way and hailed an auto-rickshaw, one of us could have left the other one to walk it alone, or we could have completed the walkathon.

In the end, cricket was the winner since it made the two of us take that journey and complete the walk successfully. Ah! This IPL is wide open, isn't it?